Bio 2.0 is coming, with
protein synthesis on-demand. I thought it was in the far future, but
then I found this great hands-on article
explaining how to do it, right now!

That article blew my mind two ways:

You can literally type a sequence of base pairs (e.g., ATCGATTGAGCTCTAGCG) into a text file
and a lab can create the protein you specified.

You can completely automate testing. The above article shows how to write a Python program
to say exactly how you want your biology experiment conducted. Your experiment can have conditions.
The way the above works is ...

Everybody knows economic productivity is the key to how fast an economy
can grow, right? So the below image from the
BLS shows a disturbing lack of
productivity in the last 8 years:

Working in IT, that seems totally wrong, because the Internet has been a
great productivity booster for more than the last decade. You can get
questions answered on StackExchange, use or
write open source software on GitHub, collaborate
remotely using a ton of different collaboration tools (email,
screensharing, group chat, etc.).

The standard productivity measure does not include all these new
technologies and ways of working. So ...

Vernor Vinge is one of my
favorite sci-fi authors. I just read his new book, Rainbows
End, and I highly
recommend it. It's set in the near term future (within 20 years), and it
has a bunch of technological and social predictions I want to list here
since I can't find them on the Internet (Vinge has a 50 min podcast
available which discusses some of
them). These aren't plot spoilers, but they are technology spoilers,
so don't read this if you plan on reading the book: